So, I'm home for two days in the middle of the tour, and I just wanted to update people. It's been a really interesting experience. We have five schools under our belt, and three more to go—and I've learned a lot. The main thing I've learned is that we need to adapt and be nimble and change as we go along.
So we've kept the purpose the same, but we've changed the events to be more of me asking direct questions, Street Epistemology style, seeing if people have sufficient evidence to warrant their belief. We put lines on the floor, like a Likert scale, from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree," with "neutral" being in the middle. And we ask the people to stand in the lines, then we read a question. We actually have people vote, kind of a rank-choice voting on the questions beforehand. And then I ask them questions to see if they'll move off of the line and what that evidence would look like. And we use that as a modeling behavior to expose elements of the ideology and when people don't have sufficient reasons to justify their beliefs. And then I ask the students, mostly students, but often community members, if they understand the other person's position better. And uniformly, I've yet to have a single person who said no, that they don't.
It's been a really interesting evolution of an event. And I'm really happy to say, you know, how these things are looking at how they're coming along. We have had a lot of hiccups along the way. Berkeley tried to cancel us, but the Republican guy was fantastic, David, Berkeley Republicans. And basically, I think he threatened to sue. And so they gave us our room at the last second. Yale canceled us or disinvited us. So, you know, we've had some hiccups, but overall, I think it's, I think it's gone well, and I'm really happy with the changes that we've made.
We're going to upload some of that footage as soon as possible, so please be patient with us. We really are a skeleton crew, and we're trying to do our best. We're doing this on a super hyper-low budget. And even then, we've overspent on this tour significantly. But I think people are getting something out of it. We do exit interviews at the end and universally people enjoy it. You know, one feedback we receive is, "I wish it were longer." And I also ask, we ask, "what would you do to improve?" And then we take that improvement, those suggestions, and we improve every time. So I'm just delighted by how it's going. Alright, so we'll get those videos up as soon as possible. And I'd like to thank everybody for their support, and three more events!
Here are the event links for the remaining 2 tour stops:
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